Profit and Public Good Clash in Grand Plans

Tishman Speyers vision for the West Side railyards.Credit
Tishman Speyer

The bitter battles over reconstruction plans for ground zero. The unraveling of the Atlantic Yards development in Brooklyn. And now this.

Given current economic realities, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s selection on Wednesday of a team led by Tishman Speyer to develop the West Side railyards seems like a wishful fantasy. Yet even if the project takes decades to realize, it is a damning indictment of large-scale development in New York.

Like the ground zero and Atlantic Yards fiascos, its overblown scale and reliance on tired urban planning formulas should force a serious reappraisal of the public-private partnerships that shape development in the city today. And in many ways the West Side railyards is the most disturbing of the three. Because of its size and location — 12.4 million square feet on 26 acres in Midtown — it will have the most impact on the city’s identity. Yet unlike the other two developments, it lacks even the pretense of architectural ambition.

On the contrary, as a money-making venture conceived by a cash-starved transit authority, it signals a level of cynicism that should prod us to demand a moratorium on all such development until our public officials return to their senses.

Dollar signs first appeared in the eyes of authority officials when the city unfurled its misguided vision of playing host to the 2012 Olympics. That plan would have involved building a football stadium for the New York Jets on the western part of the railyards. (The stadium plan was mercifully abandoned in 2005 after it failed to receive state support.)

The current proposal essentially takes off where that earlier plan left off by championing profit over the public good. Rising on a vast platform to be built over the train tracks, the project is conceived as a series of soaring corporate and residential towers flanking the northern and southern ends of a narrow park running from 10th Avenue to the West Side Highway, between 30th and 33rd Streets. City officials say the deal will generate $1 billion in income over a 99-year lease.

Designed by Murphy/Jahn, the buildings are a throwback to the days when corporate Modernism was taking its dying breaths. Towering glass blocks, their most original features are a series of deep cantilevers that allow the developer to suspend buildings over the High Line, the public park being built on a stretch of abandoned elevated tracks in Chelsea. (The cantilevers are an obvious reference to the bases of the 1978 Citicorp Center and the former I.B.M. Building of 1983, though at a blown-up scale.)

Like most of the teams that competed for the project, Murphy/Jahn also chose to open up view corridors to the east and west, creating a canyon of towers that frames views of the Hudson River at one end and the Manhattan skyline at the other.

But at ground level, the project is miserably depressing. Although it is described as a public park, the central garden is a meager strip of grass, trees and walkways that would be overshadowed by the buildings on either side. Tishman Speyer envisions a gantlet of stores and cafes, further chipping away at any notion of noble public space and threatening to transform the garden into a glorified outdoor mall.

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I’m sorry. Did I say threatening? In fact the park’s eastern end, which would be developed first, would be a glorified mall anchored by a vast outdoor plaza. Encircled by rings of shallow steps, the plaza would extend northward to connect to a proposed pedestrian boulevard. Both the plaza and an adjoining multistory mall suggest the kind of pseudosuburbia that has been eating away at our urban identity since the Giuliani years.

Equally unsettling is how the project fits into the surrounding urban fabric. The towers loom over the High Line, forming a colossal barrier against the Chelsea neighborhood to the south. (Allowing 11th Avenue to run through the site will lessen the effect slightly, but not much.) Arranging the towers along an east-west axis — a break from the traditional Manhattan grid — is only apt to reinforce the site’s image as an introverted corporate enclave.

This seems to suit the transportation authority’s agenda just fine: it always has been more interested in how much money it could make off the site than in the impact that the development would have on New York. The city could build at much lower density without spending a penny of taxpayer money. Of five competing proposals for the site, only one would have significantly limited its density. That proposal from Steven Holl Architects would have spanned the tracks with a cable structure, and it was one of the first to be rejected. The transportation authority seems to have simply gone with the highest bidder.

If recent history teaches us anything, it is that the project is only likely to get worse. This is because of the nature of the urban planning process in New York, which tends to lock in the worst parts of a design while allowing a developer to chip away at what is most original and often most costly.

New York is experiencing the repercussions of such thinking at ground zero, where Daniel Libeskind’s master plan, unveiled by Gov. George E. Pataki to mixed reviews in 2003, is now a distant memory. Various design components have been watered down until they are barely recognizable.

In the Atlantic Yards project, Forest City Ratner acknowledged last week that it would delay building most of the elements of Frank Gehry’s design for that eight million-square-foot development because it is short of financing. If built, the project would be a pathetic distortion of the original design. And the developer already has state approval.

There will be a similar predicament if the city manages to steamroll the Tishman Speyer railyards proposal through the public review process. The broad outlines will be virtually set in stone, from the position of the park to the location of a yet-unchosen cultural institution. So will the site’s density, among the highest in the city. And the architecture within the plan will gradually diminish in quality. The West Side railyards is as good a place as any to start rethinking this disastrous approach to charting the city’s future. The transportation authority could begin by taking the planning process out of the hands of bean counters who have little interest in anything but profit. It could bring in more thoughtful voices from the urban planning and architectural fields. It could take into account the ups and downs of the area’s economy and how a neighborhood of this scale might evolve.

But that would mean championing the public good rather than hustling for money.

Correction: April 2, 2008

The architecture column on Thursday, about the choice of a developer for the West Side railyards, referred incorrectly to the Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn in citing major developments that have been delayed or altered. The Atlantic Yards plan has been approved by New York State, not New York City.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page E1 of the New York edition with the headline: Profit and Public Good Clash in Grand Plans. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe